Tavares Strachan: Starless Midnight

Marian Goodman Gallery New York is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of Tavares Strachan titled Starless Midnight. This immersive presentation will feature several new and existing bodies of work across seven diverse and site-specific environments. Through an interconnected array of works comprising painting, sound, robotics, neon, marble, and hair, Starless Midnight is a testament to Strachan’s multifaceted artistic practice, structured by a visual language of storytelling. Strachan’s boldly inventive and ambitious work summons historical and cultural references, expressing the affinities, contradictions, and dependencies within oft-untold stories of historically marginalized individuals, places, and events, and finding the interstices between the disciplines of art, science, history, exploration.  

The first floor opens on to an immersive landscape with a near life-size ceramic of the musician and artist Exuma commanding the space from the center of a ‘meadow’ of rice grass. Viewed from above, the installation takes the shape of the Ghanaian Adinkra symbol Okodee Mmowere, which directly translates to “eagle’s talons,” metaphysically denoting bravery. Able to transgress the limitations of a phonetic writing system in its expansive interpretations, Okodee Mmowere pulls rice as the wefting thread of universal culinary staples, spanning across civilizations, space, and time. Adjacent in the same gallery, and an anchoring point of the exhibition, is a quote by James Baldwin that begins, “You could be that person…” Transcribed in Strachan’s neon calligraphy, the words flash in time with a dissonant sound work. Throughout this sensory parcours, Strachan assembles fragmented components of cultural and historical significance into rich visual, olfactory, and sonic allegories. The themes within this bricolage landscape call upon a poetics of being, to build on new relational capacities between individuals and the world.  

In the second-floor gallery, Strachan introduces a new body of paintings consisting of hand-tiled and painted word searches that speak to the artist’s focus on visibility and invisibility. Overwhelmingly detailed, meticulously painted bits of paper and fiber absorb the viewer into labyrinthine inquiries of storytelling, star gazing, and exploration. While serious in their content, they simultaneously evoke a playful nostalgia of CRTs and television static. A manifestation of electromagnetic noise, the English language is reduced to tactile fragments, the letters nearly feeling debris-like in their fragile organization.

Each work in this exhibition features infinite references to years of research from Strachan’s ongoing project The Encyclopedia of Invisibility—an encyclopedia of his own construction to house lost stories. Offering a multitude of interpretations on subjects from galactic clusters to the fragility of digital data in the information age, Strachan imaginatively maps the unknown and the process by which we attempt to conquer knowledge.

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Linda Pellegrini, Head of Communications and Events
linda@mariangoodman.com
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